[log] chips but no salsa [closed]

[mrcreamsicles]

Characters: Davesprite, Karkat, the Cat, Beckett, Angel, Rhys (the dickcheese one), and Enoch
Location: Building 309
Date: Day 285
Summary: A whole bunch of people meet up, tablet chips get handed off, and maybe pancakes happen.
Warnings: Nothing planned.

309: A house, green on the Geiger counter, that probably should have been redecorated ages ago. Everything looks to be from the 60s or 70s. There was carpeting here, but it's gone now, revealing a locked trapdoor in the bedroom. There's a bedroom, living room, kitchen, and bathroom. "зеленый" is written on the inside of the door. A ration box from the convenience store has been attached to the inside of one of the kitchen cabinets with wood glue. On the kitchen wall beneath it, a message has been painted in black: "i left a ration box here for storing food. if you want to leave rations for the people exploring it should hopefully protect them from radiation. any other supplies can go in the cupboard outside the box. contact davesprite (@featherydouche) if some fucker steals it".

Comments

[bookofnope]

I don't mean how you continue to function. I can do that, by sheer contrary stubbornness if nothing else. Give or take the occasional nervous breakdown, but I blame those on the flu.

[He takes that edge and he runs with it. Now this is how his interactions usually go. Touch a nerve and grab hold and keep pulling.]

I mean what it makes of you. What... debts it leaves, to everything that didn't make it out. Doomed timelines, bollocks. It existed. To leave it behind is to surrender to the inexcusable arbitrariness of fate.

[mrcreamsicles]

[This is... annoying feels too mild, somehow. It's not enraging or anything on that level, but it worms in and picks at all these points of irritation.]

Then what do you want from me, Beckett? Everyone who's been here from paradox space has to be doomed on some level, because since when would the game have taken Norfinbury into account? If I go back, I'm dead. You talk like you're assuming I've got any choice in what timeline is or isn't the alpha, and it doesn't work that way.

[bookofnope]

[The deflection throws him. Normally he's quite good at spinning such questions back into questions of his own, but this is actually a good one. What does he want?]

No - I don't think you have any say. It's happened and done, for both of us, and I'm just as dead as you. I suppose, [he passes his tongue over his fangs,] what I want is to know that it mattered. How does one make it matter, rather than simply survive it and move on.

[mrcreamsicles]

God, you sound like House.

[He reaches up, rubs at his forehead, then runs his fingers back through his hair.]

I don't know, dude. You're asking a 17-year-old like I can unlock the secrets of the universe for you. You want your meaning of life? Go fuck yourself. That's what life keeps telling me. There is no meaning; you only ever deal with what you're handed.

[He holds his hand out to him, open-palmed.]

I want the curtains back.

[bookofnope]

No.

[It's a petulant grumble that he doesn't really mean. He's going to hand the curtains back in a minute. He's not that petty. But as long as he's got hold of them he can maybe pull out just a little bit more, and damn the consequences. For a minute, at least.]

I don't sound like House. Is that all it is for you? The undoing of your reality as you know it - just the universe saying go fuck yourself, deal with it? Don't you feel compelled to preserve some... some legacy?

[mrcreamsicles]

You do too, Beckett. He called me one night when I happened to be dying and tried to get me to do some kind of experiment so it would "matter". Maybe I don't want it to matter. I don't want a "legacy"; I just want my life to chill for once so I can have some shred of normal. If you want help with your mid-unlife crisis, then go harass someone else, and give me back the curtains.

[He jostles his hand in the air insistently.]

[bookofnope]

[It's amazing how effective a deterrent "you sound like House" can be. Especially when he's had his own very similar experience with the doctor. Beckett grits his teeth, and seethes, and mentally curses normal, but he pulls the curtains off - a measured gesture, trying to make it look like no big deal - and hands them back.]

Fair enough. Your life. I can't force you to think the way I do. But don't tell me I'd have used your death to further my - curiosity. Not me.

[He might have. That's the worry.]

[mrcreamsicles]

[Of course it's a bigger deal when he was the petulant one keeping them on his lap just a moment before. Davesprite rolls his eyes behind his sunglasses, but takes them when they're handed over, and rises from the couch to collect his other things. He's not leaving this house today after the long night traveling through the tunnels, but he can at least move to another room.]

The dying wasn't the point; the point was insisting somebody else's life you're not living has to matter in a way you think it does. Go worry about your own self, Beckett.

[It's a bit of a mess to try to haul everything at once, and most of his layers get draped over his back and shoulders like a pretentious asshole's cape collection to free up his arms for his bags. If that's all from Beckett, he'll scoot on over to chill in the bedroom.]